Up today is CAP, whose new report received a fawning New York Times mention. The piece paraphrases an anti-gun public-health researcher, Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins, as saying the research is “scientifically sound”; for a response, the reporter went to the NRA instead of a qualified researcher with pro-gun sympathies. Even a halfway skeptical anti-gun researcher might have raised some concerns: Garen Wintemute of UC-Davis has criticized studies similar to CAP’s in the past.

Anyhow, this chart represents the thrust of the report:

Basically, states with stricter gun-control laws have less gun violence. This is an interesting exercise, but it fails to address any of the myriad problems that plague gun research.

First of all, the technical-sounding “Gun Violence Index” is really just a measure of gun deaths—the overall gun-death rate is actually one of the index’s ten components, and all but one of the others are just specific types of gun deaths (gun suicides, gun homicides, gun accidents, police shootings, etc.). The overall gun-death rate correlates so strongly with the Gun Violence Index that the two are nearly identical. My chart, their numbers:

I’m pointing this out because there are two major problems with studying “gun deaths.” The biggest is that we shouldn’t care about reducing gun deaths; we should care about reducing total deaths. If we reduce gun deaths, but people simply commit violence with other weapons instead, we’re just spinning our wheels—and yet studies of gun deaths will say we’re making progress.

The other major problem is that gun deaths comprise two very different phenomena. About two-thirds are suicides, with most of the rest being homicides (plus some accidents). Suicide and homicide are completely different things, often targeting the opposite demographic groups (old vs. young, rural vs. urban, white vs. black). They also raise different political questions, as many of us hesitate to restrict people’s freedom for their own good. Suicide and homicide need to be studied separately, even though they both involve guns.

We can see the importance of this second point in CAP’s own data. Most strikingly, the report’s central claim—that states with stricter gun laws have less gun violence—does not hold for homicide, which is what most people think of when they hear “gun violence.” Not that most readers could tell that from the report: the finding is relegated to a footnote, and even there the authors fail to note that the correlation is far too weak to be considered statistically significant.

(Technically speaking, it’s 0.13, with 50 observations, one for each state. That translates to a “p-value” of 0.37, far above the traditional 0.05 cutoff. If you generated the data at random, there would be more than a one-in-three chance of getting a correlation this strong.)

None of this is necessarily to deny that weak gun laws or high gun ownership—CAP’s report makes no attempt to distinguish between the two*—can have bad consequences. They do seem to correlate with suicide rates, as well as some specific types of homicide, including police and intimate-partner violence. Even when it comes to overall homicide rates, some more advanced studies (though far from all) argue there’s a correlation there once the data have been adjusted to account for differences in demographics and culture.

Of course, such adjustments are crucial if we are trying to discover causation, and not mere correlation. But CAP’s analysis makes no attempt to perform them. And even if we could definitively say that strict gun laws reduce violence, the analysis would say nothing about which gun laws in particular help, because they’re all compressed into a single scale.

But don’t despair. Over the next two days, I’ll look at two other new studies that are a bit more intricate.

*I suspect that to a large extent, strong gun laws simply reflect the fact that the people of a state don’t own many guns, and thus don’t oppose such laws. I can’t report an actual correlation between CAP’s gun-law measure and gun ownership, though, because the full gun-law data are not provided in the report and I have been unable to get them. They come from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence; the lead author of the CAP report told me she doesn’t have permission to share them, and several emails and a voicemail to the Law Center have gone unanswered.

For whatever it’s worth, though, I did try to digitally extract the data from CAP’s scatterplot and match them to the correct states. It’s not perfect, but my correlations between gun-law weakness and CAP’s gun-violence indicators are very close to the ones in CAP’s footnote, and my gun-law measure correlates strongly (0.8) with a 2004 gun-ownership survey.

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13 Responses to Does Gun Control Work? Part I

I’ve been examine this issue, what I noticed was that in states with LESS gun control laws the per capita robber rate was lower. The per capita homicide rates were really uneffectected either more or less gun control. Car theft was only slightly lower in states with less gun control. However a much stronger correlation was between different violent crime categories per capita rates and race when I looked at the demographics for each state. My hypothesis is that the main reason for the differing rates is that black and Hispanic Americans who are poor and living in crime ridden. Areas are more likely to be involved with criminal gangs who are making money in the illegal drug trade simply because that is the easiest way to become financially successful as opposed to facing tremendous hurdles in affording college and getting jobs which act as a stepping stone while they are a student. Solution: legalize all drugs and the profit margins will plummet; offer companies significant tax breaks if they relocate toeconomicallydepressed areas and hire a percentage of residents living within a 10 mile radius, eliminate or reduce welfare for mothers and offer grants or heavily subsidizes tuition to iner city residents

Are you kidding? Guns make both suicide and murder much much easier. Have you ever tried to strangle somebody? Not easy they fight back you have to have real commitment to finish the job. Gun not so much pull the trigger it is done (well maybe a few more times to be sure)

Also suicide gun pretty simple, beats having to drag my sorry ass all the way to the Golden Gate bridge and then jump.

Just for instance what if every month your health insurance co mailed you an effective, painless suicide pill do you think suicides would go up or down?

In re not having a gun simply means violence by other means, yes, with limits. Guns are terrifically efficient at what they’re intended to do. It’s much easier to kill someone with a gun than with a knife or baseball bat and to the degree that emotion is involved one might calm down a bit while stabbing or beating someone, whereas with a gun the trigger, once pulled, is pulled. Same for suicide by gun. If one has to cut one’s blood vessels adequately or find a bridge or high building to jump from there is time for reflection. With a gun, that time isn’t there.

More guns = more gun injuries and deaths. I’m not advocating repeal of the 2nd amendment; I got my first gun at age13 and have owned them continuously since then, but we don’t read of toddlers accidentally stabbing or poisoning one another or a parent. People who don’t think devices specifically designed to cause violent injury or death don’t do those things are deluded.

I am a former crisis counselor for the Samaritans, the world’s oldest suicide prevention group. One thing is certain: Suicide and murder are different phenomena, linked only by death. To conflate murder and suicide into a “gun violence” total is purely a political contrivance.

Another thing is certain: Suicide is not a single phenomenon. The suicidal gesture of a disturbed, pill-swallowing young woman in the suburbs is much different than the suicide of a 70-year-old widower in rural Wyoming, alone and suffering from cancer, who aims a gun at his head and pulls the trigger.

This is not to minimize the former; I once talked a young girl off the ledge, so to speak, and I still remember the call more than a decade later. Still, these are different phenomena in many respects.

Gun control will not stop that rural Wyoming suicide. It is not done on impulse. Short of confiscating all guns — which will NEVER happen in this country, Mr. Bloomberg’s fantasies notwithstanding — those lonely old folks with serious health problems will still shoot themselves.

If I’m wrong, those widowers will find another way.

The most theoretically “preventable” gun deaths are murders. And to do this, we must first understand who the killers are, and who their victims are. A couple tidbits:

– 75% of gun murderers have prior felony convictions, which means that their gun ownership was already illegal

– 75% of gun murder victims have prior felong convictions, which means that most murders are committed by criminals against criminals. This basically boils down to the drug trade.

– Blacks commit and suffer gun murder at 8 times the rate of whites. For black men, it’s 10 times. For other forms of murder, the black rate, both as perpetrators and victims, is 3 to 4 times the white rate. No one wants to mention this, because of the various implications.

As a liberal, who is not allergic to guns (my grandfather took me hunting and taught me to respect firearms and enjoy the sport of hunting), my main question is less about gun control by state and more by nation. Do countries with stricter gun laws have less gun violence? Is there no correlation at all?

It isn’t the guns; it’s the people who are pulling the triggers that constitute the problem. My rural township has a very high prevalence of gun ownership, but in it’s 275-year history, no one has ever been murdered here with a firearm. Most rural areas in the US have a similar profile.

We know who is responsible for the current epidemic of gun violence in this country but we cannot have an honest discussion about it and remain within the sacred bounds of political correctness.

I DISLIKE GUNS but tend to think most gun control does not work so I am huge believer in the Self-Selection bias of the study.

That the most civil and lowest crime states are the ones that most people don’t own guns. (If you don’t own guns, you really don’t care about losing your gun ownership liberty.) So I think that is important because we don’t need more guns and we should better protect the liberty of private citizens and businesses to choose not allow guns. I rather go to Gun Free Church or Gun Free Target to shop.

Van Piercy’s question is a good one as is Gregory’s response. I’m an Australian and my country is often cited in these discussions as a place with tough gun laws (not prohibition, but regulation). The control has seen a downturn in major multiple killing shooting murders in the twenty years since the Port Arthur massacre. There remains gang and drug related gun violence and there is the potential for terrorist violence as there was in Sydney a couple of years ago, so it doesn’t solve all gun problems. However, I’m living in Texas and have reason to believe that there is a qualitively different take on guns in by the general population in Australia making that country a safer one when it comes to having your life taken by a random act of gun violence. The culture makes the difference. Many of my US friends idealise the gun as a good thing in itself. One of them takes his with him when he walks his dog in a quiet Houston suburb. Others keep one handy in the glove compartment of their cars. Perhaps this is right. They certainly claim it as a right. Three weeks ago in my own quiet Houston suburb, I was locked down in my house because a sad man who lived just two blocks away started taking shots at people who were driving to work. The police quickly killed him and within three days it was as if it had never happened, except for the ragged remains of the ribbons tied around the lamp posts in the streets where it happened. Why do people do this by the way? Making a ribbon gesture or saying that one’s thoughts and prayers are with the victims seems easier than taking any other action, I suppose. People here have actually commiserated with me because, “Your government took your guns from you.” They have been misinformed. Australia’s laws do not prohibit gun ownership, but most of us do not want to own them. In Texas, with a population similar to Australia’s and many other similarities in outlook and lifestyle, many people argue that it makes them and their communities safer. However, none of the nine people shot that day (wounded – not killed – but only by the grace of God) were made safer by their right to own a gun. Consider instead that the acceptability and prevalence of guns in their community made it more likely that their attacker would emerge from among them.

“If we reduce gun deaths, but people simply commit violence with other weapons instead, we’re just spinning our wheels”

Seriously? So violent acts are fungible? Horsesh*t.

I remember a news story from a number of years ago about some defective POS in Japan who went psycho on a subway car. Guns are not readily available in Japan, so this clown had a knife. He managed to cut (CUT) about 5 people before being restrained. No one was critically injured… and no one died. If that guy had been in America, he would have had a gun/guns and it would have been a massacre.

Guns are a game-changer. I am a multiple gun owner with no desire to see gun rights unnecessarily restricted, and no particular faith in the gun control lobby to craft effective, non-punitive laws… but don’t claim that forcing violent offenders to switch to less potent weapons isn’t a win. It just makes you look like a fool.